May 31, 1994
Quiet Parish Paradise Destroyed By Massacre
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
NYARUBUYE, Rwanda
Once upon a time, the Nyarubuye Parish was a hidden piece of paradise high in the hills near the Tanzanian border, a complex of cool brick and clay buildings surrounded by banana trees and wildflowers.
Today, as many as 20,000 bodies cover the convent and its grounds.
The Roman Catholic parish is the most recently discovered - and possibly the worst - massacre site in the gruesome civil war destroying Rwanda.
Patrols of the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front discovered the legions of dead last week, about a month after seizing the region from government troops.
Nobody knows how many people died here beginning at noon on April 14. The number of bodies covering the parish health clinic, schools, homes, fields, offices and chapel is impossible to guess. But a frightened nun's estimate of 20,000 doesn't seem exaggerated.
Sister Marie Erneste Nyiramuganga, from the Convent of the Sisters of Benebikira, hid in the chapel as the killers struck: shooting, swinging machetes, hurling grenades and bludgeoning with nail-studded clubs. For hours she huddled in a corner as attackers returned four times in one day.
Waves of attackers coming from all sides were joined by several government police officers in uniform, she and several other survivors said Tuesday. Some of the attackers masked their faces with leaves from banana trees.
One of the survivors, 28-year-old Gaspard Ngarambe, spent four months as a seminary student at the parish. On Tuesday, he returned to find the headless corpse of a baby in the room where he read, prayed, wrote, and dreamed.
After stepping around the remains of hundreds of decaying bodies, he reached his room to find the tiny body on the cement floor, among his books, letters, clothes, and several wooden crosses.
Everywhere cadavers lay twisted in a tangle of death - in classrooms, the clinic, the kitchen and among the brilliantly colored bushes of wildflowers.
Some clearly ran for their lives. One man - now just bones and bits of withered skin - lies at the foot of the chapel steps.
Others might have accepted their fate, like the little girl whose shoes were placed carefully side-by-side on a rock near a pile of bodies.
Survivors say the killers were Hutus and separated the crowd into Tutsi and Hutu groups. The Hutus were ordered to kill the Tutsi, and those who refused were killed themselves.
Ngarambe joined a few survivors who fled into the bush, hiding by day and trekking by night toward the Kagera River that marks the border with Tanzania. About 350 people from Nyarubuye made it to a Tanzanian refugee camp, where some remain, he said.
Others, like Ngarambe, have since returned, saying life in the camp was too wretched to endure.
Attacks like those at Nyarubuye Parish have ravaged Rwanda since April 6 when a suspicious plane crash killed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a member of the majority Hutu tribe.
A report of a new massacre was received in the capital on Tuesday.
U.N. spokesman Abdul Kabia said 500 people had reportedly been slain in Red Cross refugee camps outside the capital, Kigali, about 90 miles to the west. Most of dead in Kabgayi were also reportedly Tutsis, the minority that has been the main target of attacks by the mainly Hutu government soldiers and civilian militias.
As Ngarambe described his escape, a Hutu in baggy pants and a ski parka walked up the dirt road, his hands held high in surrender. The man, Theogene Biramahire, ran a carpentry shop on the parish grounds and recognized Ngarambe as an old customer.
The man carried a cap of the late Hutu president's party, which includes the Interahamwe militia blamed for most of the massacres. Biramahire said he found the cap and kept it for protection from the blazing sun. He denied killing anyone, although he said he was ordered to do so.
Within an hour, several more Hutu men had come out of the bush, all claiming they did not take part in the massacre and accusing a local Hutu village leader of ordering the killings.
That man, Karamagi Izayi, is still in Nyarubuye and makes no effort to hide. Standing proudly in a dirty, ochre safari suit, Izayi told a small group of journalists he had sheltered Tutsis and was himself on the run from angry Hutus.
In the end, the rebels left the Hutus behind, not believing their stories but realizing there were few left that they might kill.
June 4, 1994
Capital of Former Tutsi Kingdom Faces Influx of Refugees
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
NYANZA, Rwanda
This mountain village was once the capital of a Tutsi kingdom, a teeming center of trade and industry where people lived in homes with gardens out front and wells of clear rainwater in back.
Now, the wells are filled with bodies, the water is too contaminated to drink and the royal palace is a gaudy reminder of better days.
Nyanza is one of the latest casualties of Rwanda's civil war. The town of 20,000 fell Monday to mainly Tutsi rebels and is now taking in victims from the rebels' next target 15 miles up the road, Kabgayi.
The rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front claimed to have taken Kabgayi on Thursday, but the sounds of battle heard Saturday in Nyanza made clear that pockets of government resistance remained.
Each day of fighting in Kabgayi brings more desperate refugees to Nyanza, more victims to the Red Cross hospital on Rue des Ecoles, more wandering children to Father Giorgio Vito's orphanage.
The hospital had been in Kabgayi, but fighting forced the Red Cross to move it to Nyanza. Red Cross trucks carry the injured from Kabgayi to the facility, which has two doctors, three nurses, no electricity, no water and no food.
"We try to arrange food and water for them. When we get that, then we can begin to operate," said Margit Pesonem, a Finnish Red Cross worker.
Waiting for treatment results in more infection and illness from festering machete, grenade and gunshot wounds. Awaiting care on Saturday was 12-year-old Kwizera, who was shot in the leg during a government attack on his village.
Beside him, on a mattress on a concrete floor, lay 15-year-old Yvonne, her stomach filled with shrapnel from a grenade blast. Like most children here, they had no idea where their parents are.
Down the road, dozens of refugees from Kabgayi fought over a bag of canned food that lay on the side of the road.
In the yard of a nearby house, a resident pointed out wells that held the bodies of people killed in attacks that began in Nyanza and throughout Rwanda after President Juvenal Habyarimana, a member of the majority Hutu ethnic group, died in a mysterious plane crash April 6.
That set off renewed fighting between the army and rebels and massacres of an estimated 200,000 people, many of them minority Tutsis and Hutus believed to oppose the Hutu-dominated government.
For centuries before independence, Nyanza was the capital of a Tutsi kingdom. The massive yellow royal palace sits on a hill overlooking the town. It was turned into a museum after independence in 1961, but Hutus recently looted the place and murdered the guards.
Such ethnic divisiveness was not known in Nyanza before April, said Eugene Musiliza, 25, a resident of Nyanza, 30 miles southwest of the capital Kigali.
"There were a lot of traders, carpenters and the like, who did business here. Hutu and Tutsi lived together without problems," he said.
Since April, the population at Vito's orphanage has soared from about 100 to about 650. Seventy percent of the children are Tutsis. Not all are sure they are orphans - some do not know if their parents are dead or alive.
Many have seen their families massacred and wander silently in the yard, fingering pink plastic crucifixes given to them by the orphanage, which gets donations from the Red Cross and Father Vito's Roman Catholic order in Italy.
Father Vito said government soldiers came to the orphanage on the eve of the rebel victory threatening to kill him unless he handed over the facility's money. The troops left but returned and forced Vito to hand over the $ 26,000.
On a third visit, the soldiers demanded the orphanage cars. When told the keys could not be found, the sold
June 5, 1994
Could Devastation and Massacre Turn Fertile Rwanda Into Another Somalia?
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
RUHANGO, Rwanda
A little Somalia is developing in this shady town of eucalyptus trees and winding dirt roads.
Fifteen miles from the front line of Rwanda's civil war, Ruhango has become the last refuge for thousands of people fleeing the fighting.
It provides a glimpse of what Rwanda could become as a result of the war between the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the government - a nation of skeletal victims surrounded by fertile land but unable to feed themselves.
Rwanda so far has not been hit by the mass starvation that accompanied the civil war in Somalia. Refugees pouring from wrecked cities carry huge bundles on their heads and appear healthy; some are fat.
But Ruhango is just up the road from Kabgayi and Gitarama, the interim government's beleaguered stronghold, where weeks of fighting have made caring for the sick and wounded impossible.
Aid agencies are virtually non-existent in those cities and in vast areas of the country still engulfed in fighting. Most civilians not lucky enough to escape Kabgayi and Gitarama are now too sick to fend for themselves.
The rebels claimed control of most of Kabgayi on Thursday. On Sunday, they brought journalists to the area to see those who had survived.
More than 5,000 people have escaped to Ruhango, turning it into a sprawling, smoky camp of the barely living and the dead - all within sight of banana trees and sorghum fields growing in the nearby hills.
In a scene reminiscent of the Somali famine, hundreds of men, women and children huddled together in the former municipal auditorium. Most were too weak to sit up, their bones covered by chafed skin oozing with open sores, their eyes sunken and cheeks hollowed by weeks without food.
One little girl in a red dress crawled toward a field of grass used as a communal toilet. Too exhausted to continue, she collapsed in a heap.
"Unlike Somalia, we have food in the field," said rebel Lt. Tony Kulamba. "The situation for the moment may be contained, but you see more people being brought in. ... There will be a need for international assistance."
The scene here is likely to be repeated in cities across the country, as access to remote areas still wracked by fighting opens up.
Dr. Robert Karangwa, a Rwandan treating patients in the Ruhango hall, estimated that 30 of them had died since Thursday of starvation, malnutrition and diseases such as tuberculosis and diarrhea.
Vicitor Muyango is 37 but looked 60 as he lay on a pile of dead leaves, a dirty blue shirt and beige pants hanging over his emaciated body. His wife and five children were killed by pro-government militiamen, and he spent weeks hiding in a sorghum field around Kabgayi before the rebels brought him here.
"I expected to die," he said as he lay crumpled on a floor covered with human waste, surrounded by other living skeletons.
Nearby, a starving woman lay on a pink blanket, still wearing shiny white patent-leather pumps on her bony feet.
Little concern is shown for those unfortunate enough to be alone. Families huddle in corners around iron cooking pots, heating up a porridge-like concoction made by women pounding corn into mash outside.
Down the road is a clinic where hundreds more people are waiting for treatment. Others lay dying on the grass outside, to be carted away through the teeming crowd of refugees and put into anonymous graves.
June 6, 1994
Aid Agencies Struggle to Cope With Mounting Crisis
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
RUHANGO, Rwanda
As the sun set Monday behind a smoky field of sick, starving and dying people, another body was bundled into a blanket and carried away to a large burial pit.
It is a scene repeated at least 20 times a day here as skeletal victims pour into Ruhango from the front line of Rwanda's civil war 15 miles away.
But there are no foreign aid workers in Ruhango, no clean water, barely any food, no new medicine for these forgotten victims. And as long as fighting rages, aid seems very far away.
"We can't cope with the situation alone. I don't know that we can do much more," said Margit Pesonem, a Finnish Red Cross worker at the agency's hospital in Nyanza, about 15 miles southwest of Ruhango.
Most aid agencies have pulled out of Rwanda to escape the bloodletting. An estimated 200,000 people have been massacred there, U.N. peacekeepers have been brutally attacked, and Hutu-led government troops are fighting rebels of the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front.
Aid groups feeding the estimated 300,000 Rwandans at a refugee camp in neighboring Tanzania say they could do the same in Rwanda - if it were safe.
But attracting aid to Rwanda has been difficult from the start. In April, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called it a "scandal" when only four nations responded to his appeal to take part in a peacekeeping mission here.
The rebels say the government scared off relief organizations when government-backed militias seized civilians from the agencies' care and executed them. Such atrocities were reported shortly after President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed in a mysterious plane crash April 6, sparking the massacres and reigniting the civil war.
On Monday, government forces struck at rebels near the southwestern town of Kabgayi, their first major counterattack since the civil war was rekindled two months ago.
The Red Cross is one of the few agencies still active in Rwanda. It did not learn of the situation in Ruhango until journalists visited the site Sunday.
"They have no food, but we have no food either," said Dr. Mike Van Joost, at the Red Cross hospital.
A convoy of all-terrain vehicles carrying food was due to leave Monday from Burundi for Ruhango, but there was no telling when it might arrive. In the meantime, more bodies pile up and more survivors try to get to Nyanza.
On Saturday, there were 100 patients at the Nyanza hospital, most of them evacuees from Kabgayi, the town at the front line. By Monday, the number was at 143, with two doctors to handle the load.
Up the winding, tree-lined road to Ruhango, some 2,000 people were crammed into a makeshift health clinic run by a few Rwandan doctors.
They seemed to spend most of their time wandering through a dusty field full of huddled people, picking out the weakest and skinniest to be taken into one of the filthy, dark rooms of the clinic rather than be left outside.
Doctors said 20 to 25 people had died by Monday evening, about average for the clinic and the surrounding refugee camp.
"I don't know whether to say it is desperate, but we need help. We need food, we need medicine. This place has no water. You can see, they have no blankets," Dr. Desiree Ndushabandi said, gesturing at the miserable refugees.
The situation is so bad that people like Marcel Hitimana seem lucky. Hitimana made it to the Red Cross facility in Nyanza to get treatment for wounds suffered in a grenade attack April 7.
He walks on his hands now, his right leg gone at mid-thigh, a useless stump that sticks out straight ahead. His left leg is a skinny, blistered excuse for a limb and stays curled beneath his torso as his arms propel him forward.
Van Joost says there could be hundreds of thousands of people in worse shape than Hitimana. And the situation is not confined to rural areas.
In Kigali, the capital, U.N. military spokesman Jean-Guy Plante says more than 10,000 civilians are trapped in the city stadium, hotels, churches and other facilities with virtually no humanitarian assistance.
"But this is a very small number compared to what there is across the country," Plante said in a recent interview.
Only one aircraft - a Canadian C-130 transport plane - has been donated to fly in relief supplies, and it can only land when the airport is deemed secure.
"Only one plane," Plante said, his voice rising in anger. "Bring the food here, and we will distribute it."
Fritz Lherisson, head of the UNICEF delegation in Nairobi, said UNICEF has stockpiled food in Kenya and Burundi so it can be delivered quickly when conditions improve in Rwanda. He couldn't say when that might be.
June 8, 1994
Monastery Becomes Rwanda's Latest City of Horror
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
KABGAYI, Rwanda
There's a madman shouting nonsense in a corner. The bloated body of a government soldier, his eyes wide open in death, is sprawled in a nearby room.
In the middle of a courtyard, a man sits beside a cooking fire, surrounded by buzzing flies, corpses and others on the brink of death.
Six days ago, the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front took control of Kabgayi, the tiny Central African country's largest monastery, where thousands of people had sought shelter from the war, but where hundreds instead met their deaths.
The city monastery has become a nightmare of corpses and several dozen starving victims left behind in the evacuation by the rebels and the Red Cross.
Some have lost their minds, probably driven mad after weeks in this death camp. Others, like Innocent Rudasingwa, are all too aware of their surroundings.
"I don't have any hope," the emaciated man said as he sat with four other people in a filthy room once used as a medical clinic.
They are still here because they could not walk to the vehicles that have come in the last week to evacuate survivors.
Rudasingwa was living happily with his wife and five children in Kigali, the capital about 23 miles to the north, when a machete sliced into his skull on April 8 during an attack by pro-government militiamen.
His wife was killed. His five children have disappeared. His wounds have left his right arm and leg paralyzed.
The university-educated teacher, who is fluent in English and French, ended up here after hospital workers decided it was too dangerous to keep patients in the Kigali hospital.
"At the beginning we received medical assistance, but by the end it dropped. That's why they decided to remove all the patients from here," he said. "Unfortunately, we were unable to get to the trucks."
It is unclear why the Red Cross has not come back for these people. Perhaps they are not aware of them; perhaps they are simply too overloaded with other victims at a Red Cross hospital at Nyanza, about 20 miles away.
The rebels have been evacuating people when they can find transportation, but their priority is winning the war.
"The situation is the same everywhere. It is pretty hard to fight and rescue," said rebel Lt. Tony Kulamio as he wandered through a maze of leaf-and-stick huts on the monastery grounds.
An estimated 200,000 people have died since the Rwandan civil war erupted again on April 6, the day after the deaths of the president and his Burundi counterpart, both Hutus, in a mysterious plane crash.
The government forces are largely from the majority Hutu tribe while the rebel RPF is made up mostly of minority Tutsis.
The vast majority of victims have been civilians killed in widespread massacres, mostly conducted by Hutu militiamen, often backed by soldiers.
Survivors say this area was a concentration camp controlled by government troops and militiamen who each night would choose victims for execution. Others were left without food or water.
Now the huts, tents and a chapel house hundreds of dead or seemingly dead. One girl appeared long dead and lay in her decaying mother's arms on the floor of the chapel, but suddenly she moved.
Rebels bent down and removed the girl from the tangle of corpses. Within two hours, another child and an old man had been pulled from the dead. They were loaded into a truck and driven to safety.
Rudasingwa was not among them. He stayed behind, the stench of a dead man in the next room drifting down the hall. Outside the madman screamed words no one understood and waved his arms wildly.
A few steps away, another man sat staring vacantly at the dead government soldier. When asked why he did not move, the man pushed aside his blanket and showed a bullet-shattered leg.
"We don't survive. We don't eat - it is apparent," Rudasingwa said.
Rebel spokesman Wilson Gumisiriza said these living-dead would be evacuated, but he didn't say when.
"I don't know why the Red Cross is not here. How do you explain this situation?" he said with a shrug. "So, this is how Rwanda is."
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